There are many types of incidents that can take your business offline.
Just as you would plan for escape routes to protect employees from emergencies and disasters, you should also prepare a plan for your data. Fortunately, there are many steps you can take to prepare your infrastructure to prevent a critical loss of data and time to recover it.
The key objectives of an effective Disaster Recovery Plan should be:
Fulfill recovery from an acceptable point in time.
Restore in an acceptable time frame.
Ensure accuracy and functionality of restored data.
These objectives will be unique to your company's Business Analysis, and therefore should be tested.
Testing your plan will help give you a tangible sense of loss and time frame to measure against your business needs allowing for adjustments to be made prior to a real-life disaster.
So how do you test this plan?
During testing, an actual copy of back-up data is used to restore to an isolated environment. Time required to restore is noted, then environment is then turned over to selected employees for testing accuracy and functionality. Employees are engaged to provide feedback, and any deficiencies uncovered are documented.
By documenting the process you are given valuable data to outline how difficult and thorough a recovery would be. From here recommendations are made to mitigate downtime and loss in event of a real disaster.
Every business is unique. Therefore what works for one company may not for another.
It is important to discover what your unique business needs are for an acceptable recovery.
Cloud back-ups have shorter lead time than a physical server as there is no hardware to procure and get online. Employees can also work from another location in the event that there is a significant loss such as building is compromised or waiting time for damage assessment.
Check out our downloadable checklist to start your conversation about
Disaster Recovery Planning.
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